I'll need to find time to read more of the official documents. But with Bigelow's involvement, I'm not clear on what will hopefully benefit them more. Getting seats paid for trips to station are fine. Given their business, is this going to be a push to add a private habitat of their design (customized for station mass and available ports) or just for funds to whet the whistles of tourists or private investors flying up and only using spacecraft and ISS resources?Either way, it's a fascinating series of events.
As a first step, NASA is making one space station port and utilities available for industry to attach a commercial module to support commercial activities, and today is releasing a synopsis as Appendix I in NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) 2 Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). NASA expects to release the solicitation June 14, with awards made by the end of the fiscal year. The forward port of the station’s Harmony module will be available to industry for a finite period of time.NASA will follow up with a synopsis for NextSTEP 2 Appendix K in July to partner with industry in the development of future free-flying commercial stations in low-Earth orbit.
With only one port up for grabs and two competitors its winner take all. The alternative is Bigelow and Axiom share port by joining their two modules. They can still compete while sharing resources.
With only one port up for grabs and two competitors its winner take all.
Interesting if that's the case. It's Space X starting to find customers outside of Nasa for Crew Dragon and make use of used D2's.Quote from: FutureSpaceTourist on 06/07/2019 04:45 pmQuote from: kevinof on 06/07/2019 04:37 pmDo we know if these are Nasa flights or private Space X flights? I’d be very surprised if NASA is contracting the flights, seems to go against the whole ethos of what they are trying to achieve. Also the Bigelow tweet reads to me as Bigelow has paid deposits to SpaceX.
Quote from: kevinof on 06/07/2019 04:37 pmDo we know if these are Nasa flights or private Space X flights? I’d be very surprised if NASA is contracting the flights, seems to go against the whole ethos of what they are trying to achieve. Also the Bigelow tweet reads to me as Bigelow has paid deposits to SpaceX.
Do we know if these are Nasa flights or private Space X flights?